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How can this page
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Use
this page to learn more about various educational terms
used in the reading arena. While not all of them
are used in the America Learns Network, you may run
across some of the terms while supporting your students.
Please keep in mind
that you do not have to know these terms by
heart to be a successful tutor or mentor.
All you may need to know is where to go to learn
what some of these terms mean. That place
is here.
Terms you'll find below:
- Adjective
- Adverb
- Answering
Questions
- Automaticity
- Base (Root Word)
- Blend
- Blending
- Choral Reading
- Chunking
- Compound Words
- Comprehension
- Concept of Word
- Concepts of Print
- Consonant
- Context Clues
- Decoding
- Digraph
- Diphthong
- Dolch Words
- Emergent Literacy
- English Language Learners (ELL)
- Fluency
- Generating
Questions
- Grammar (Syntax)
- Grapheme
- Graphic and Semantic
Organizers
- High Frequency Words
(Sight Words)
- Homonym
- Homophone
- Homograph
- Hyperbole
- Idiom
- Informational Text
- Invented Spelling
- Irregular Past
Tense
- Limited English Proficient
(LEP)
- Literacy
- Metacognition
- Monitoring
- Morpheme
- Morphology
- Narrative
- Noun
- Onset
- Paired Reading
- Phoneme
- Phonemic
Awareness
- Phonics
- Phonological
Awareness
- Predicate
- Prefix
- Present Perfect
- Present
Perfect Continuous
- Print Awareness
- Prior Knowledge
- Readers' Theater
-
Recognizing Story Structure
- Rhyme
- Rime
- Segmenting
- Sight Words (High
Frequency Words)
- Sounding Out
- Stretching
- Structural
Analysis
- Subject
- Summarizing
- Suffix
- Syllable
- Synonym
- Tracking
- Verb
- Vocabulary
- Vowel
- Word Attack
- Word Family
Adjective
An adjective is
a word that describes a noun. An adjective can
tell what kind or how many.
Example: What Kind
Example: How
Many
Source:
Education Place (www.eduplace.com/tales)
Adverb
Adverbs are
words that describe verbs. Adverbs can
tell us how, when or where.
Example: How
-
I run laps
quickly.
-
I swim laps
slowly.
Example: When
-
I rarely run laps.
-
I always
swim laps.
Example: Where
Source:
Education Place (www.eduplace.com/tales)
Answering Questions
A comprehension strategy where students respond to questions
posed to them. Answering questions is one of
the six strategies that the
National Reading
Panel (2003) reports to have a firm scientific
basis for improving text comprehension.
Automaticity
Automaticity refers to a reader's ability to
recognize words without consciously decoding.
It means readers recognize words as whole units, and
they recognize these words quickly and accurately.
For example, the word window is seen as one
unit--window, not /w-i-n-d-o-w/ or even /win-dow/.
Learn more
here.
Base (or "root")
The essential part of a word that carries its
central meaning. Other words can be
derived or formed from the base. In
the word
information, form is the base, while
in is a prefix and ation is
a suffix.
By studying these meaningful
word parts, or morphemes, students learn
to use structural analysis as a
word
attack strategy.
Blend
A sequence of two or more
consonants in
which each letter retains its own sound, as in
str or mp.
Blending
Combining individual sounds to make words: “Say
sss…uh…nnn. Now say the word: sun”
is a simple blending exercise. Compare with
segmenting.
Choral Reading
A technique of reading aloud with one or more
other people, slowly and in unison, in order to
help children become more fluent by matching
their pace and intonation to a mature reader’s.
Chunking
(1) A strategy where the reader combines items
into meaningful units such as letters into words
or words into phrases
(2) a strategy where the reader separates words
into smaller parts or chunks so that it can be
more easily read.
Compound Words
Words formed by combining two smaller words:
starfish, cowboy. Breaking compounds into
their parts helps children deconstruct long
words and develop an understanding of word
structure.
Comprehension
The understanding of
written text—both word by word and as a
whole—that is the ultimate goal of reading and,
therefore, of reading instruction.
The following six
strategies have been reported by the National
Reading Panel (2003) to have a firm scientific
basis for improving comprehension:
monitoring; using
graphic and semantic
organizers; answering questions;
generating
questions;
recognizing story structure; and
summarizing.
Concept of Word
The understanding that the language we speak is
formed of individual words. Though it seems
obvious to adults, it is not always clear from
listening to speech; some children don’t
understand that Wansaponnatyme, for
example, is actually a series of discrete words:
Once upon a time.
Concepts of Print
The basic facts about how text and books
work—for example, we read English from left to
right and we read books from front to
back. Understanding these concepts grows out
of being read to and having other experiences
with books and text that lead to
print awareness.
Consonant
A speech sound made by completely or partially
blocking the passage of air, or the letter
representing such a sound. In English, the
consonants are b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m,
n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, z, and sometimes
y. In addition, some consonant sounds are
represented by digraphs, as in ch.
Compare with vowel.
Context Clues
Information gleaned from
surrounding words or passages, from accompanying
illustrations, or from the reader’s
understanding of the book as a whole that helps
the reader decode or understand an unfamiliar
word. Using context clues is a valuable
word
attack strategy.
Decoding
Matching speech sounds to printed letters in
order to identify written words. For example,
being able to put the letters c, a, and
t together to form cat and to
pronounce the resulting word as “cat” is a
decoding task. Note that it’s a separate skill
from understanding the meaning of the word. In
fact, simply sounding out words without
understanding them is sometimes negatively
characterized as “word calling.”
Digraph
A combination of two letters that together
represent just one sound.
Consonant digraphs
inclue th and ch; contrast them
with blends, which include two or more
consonants but retain the separate sounds of
each. Vowel digraphs include oo
and ea, in contrast to
diphthongs,
such as ow, which are a combination of
two speech sounds.
Diphthong
A combination vowel sound that glides from one
sound to the next, as in cow (/ah/ and
/w/) or oil (/aw/ and /yih/). Compare with
digraph.
Dolch
Words
The famous Dolch Word
lists are named after E.W. Dolch, who developed
a list of 220 "service words" (primarily
pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions,
conjunctions and verbs) and 95 common nouns. The
Dolch words are also known as "sight words"
because often they cannot be either illustrated
or sounded out according to regular phonetic
decoding rules. They need to be learned and
recognized "on sight."
Emergent Literacy
The stage of development when young children are
developing print awareness, knowledge of
the alphabetic principle, and other
elements of understanding about print, but are
not yet capable of reading on their own.
English Language Learners (ELL); Limited English
Proficient (LEP)
According
to Robert Linquanti, the Project Director for
English Learner Evaluation and Accountability at
WestEd, "English language learners" can be
defined as "Language minority students whose
difficulty comprehending, speaking, reading or
writing English affects their school performance
in English."
America
Learns suggests that tutors and mentors keep a
couple of ideas in mind when working with
English language learners:
-
Education research tells us that children
learn most effectively when they are able to
link new learning to what they already know
(prior knowledge). Language researchers
(Cummins, 1989; Krashen, 1996; Willig, 1985)
confirm that cross-referencing languages
(relating a new language to a known
language) is a cognitively healthy practice;
by linking the English language to your
student's home language, you may actually
prevent confusion by bringing real meaning
to their learning. An example of
cross-referencing could involve, for
example, teaching your Spanish-speaking
student that "bread" is called "bread" in
English and "pan" in Spanish.
-
One way to
increase a student's attitude towards
learning English is to include the student's
home language in relevant, positive ways. By
acknowledging and affirming a child's home
language, you can prevent the student from
feeling neglected or devalued because you
haven't ignored part of his/her culture.
English language learners can internalize
that their home language--which is often a
vital component of the student's
ethnic/cultural identity--is being outright
rejected by schools when schools..... When
students hear the following statements in
school, they often interpret them as
personal attacks on their identities: "Stop
that, we don't speak Spanish here in
school," "You're not allowed to speak Vietnamese to your friends," "We
only speak English in school ." English
language learners who show signs of
resistance to learning English do it for
various reasons, but some reasons stem from
these issues around affirmation (or the lack
thereof) of a student's ethnic and cultural
identity.
If
you're not sure of the best ways to approach
your student's needs, first discuss your
particular situation with your supervisor before
taking any actions.
Fluency
The ability to read in a smooth, flowing, connected way so that it's
possible to link words
together into meaningful phrases. Thus, the
lack of fluency often results in poor
comprehension.
Learn more
here.
Generating questions
A comprehension strategy where students
ask their
own questions in order to improve their active
processing of text and their comprehension. By
generating questions, students become aware of
whether they can answer the questions and if
they understand what they are reading. Students
learn to ask themselves questions that require
them to integrate information from different
segments of text. Generating
questions is one of the six strategies that the
National Reading Panel (2003) reports to have a
firm scientific basis for improving text
comprehension.
Grammar (also known as Syntax)
The relationship among words in sentences.
Grapheme
Any of the letters or combinations of letters that can
represent a given phoneme, or speech
sound. A, ai, ay, ea, ey and eigh
are all graphemes for the long a sound.
Graphic and Semantic Organizers
A comprehension strategy that uses
visual representations to illustrate concepts
and interrelationships among concepts in a text,
using diagrams or other pictorial devices.
Graphic
organizers are known by different names, such as
maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters.
Semantic organizers (also called semantic maps
or semantic webs) are graphic organizers that
look somewhat like a spider web. In a semantic
organizer, lines connect a central concept to a
variety of related ideas and events. Regardless
of the label, graphic organizers can help
readers focus on concepts and how they are
related to other concepts.
Using graphic and semantic
organizers is one of the six strategies that the
National Reading Panel (2003) reports to have a
firm scientific basis for improving text
comprehension.
Homonym
A word with the same pronunciation and/or spelling as another
but different in meaning, as in to "bear" the
weight and the "bear" inthe forest.
Homophone
A word with the
same pronunciation as another but it is
different in meaning or spelling, as in "to" and
"too."
Homograph
A word with the
same spelling as another but is different in
meaning or pronunciation, as in "bow" of a ship
and "bow" and arrow.
Hyperbole
Obvious
exaggeration.
Example:
If you saw an enormous dog on the street, and
then told your friend that, "I saw a dog the
size of the moon," your statement would be
classified as hyperbole.
Source: United
Federation of Teachers Resource Guide (www.uft.org)
Idiom
A popular
expression whose meaning cannot be understood
when read literally, but figuratively. For
example, the phrase "time flies" doesn't mean
that time flies through the air, but that time
seems to be moving quickly.
Informational
Text
Nonfiction text that
conveys or explains information. Examples
include news reports, biographies, text books of
various subjects (e.g., history and science),
and personal narratives.
Invented Spelling
The mostly phonetic spelling that young children use as they
begin to write; it is often incorrect but
usually follows a clear internal logic.
For example, some children spell the word
"phone" by writing fone.
Irregular Past
Tense
These are verbs that
do not follow the conventional way of simply
adding "ed" to the end of a present tense
verb to form the past tense.
Examples include complete irregulars, such
as "went," "flew," and "gave," as well as
verbs that double the ending consonant and
then add "ed," such as "tagged." Also
included in the irregular verbs are words
that change the spelling of their endings,
such as "tried."
Here is a sample of a
regular verb versus an irregular verb from
the present to the past tense.
Regular:
Present: I walk to
the store.
Past: I walked to
the store.
Irregular:
Present: I am
happy.
Past: I was
happy.
Limited English Proficient
See
English Language Learners.
Literacy
The ability to use text to make meaning—both by reading the
texts that other have written and by writing
texts yourself.
Reading and writing are two sides of the
literacy coin, and neither is complete without
the other.
Metacognition
“Thinking about thinking.” Good readers use
metacognitive strategies to think about and have
control over their reading.
Monitoring
A comprehension strategy
that teaches students to track what they do and
do not understand as they read. Through monitoring,
students employ a variety of “fix-up” strategies
to resolve problems in their understanding of
the text. Monitoring is one of the six
strategies that the National Reading Panel
(2003) reports to have a firm scientific basis
for improving text comprehension.
It is also a critical part of
metacognition,
which has received a great deal of attention in
the reading research.
Morpheme
The smallest unit of meaning. It may be a
prefix, a
suffix, or a
base—for example,
trans and form in transform,
or re, form, and ed in
reformed.
Morphology
The study of word formations, particularly the word parts
known as morphemes. This study helps
build vocabulary knowledge and deepen
comprehension.
Narrative
A narrative is a written
story or event from your own life. If you've
ever written about a personal experience in a
journal or written a report about what you did
over summer break, you've written a narrative.
Noun
Nouns are words
that name persons (Mary; dentists), places
(playground; kitchens) or things (toy, balls).
Source:
Education Place (www.eduplace.com/tales)
Onset
The initial sound of a word, as opposed to its rime. In change,
street, and mat, the sounds /ch/,
/str/ and /m/ are onsets.
Paired reading
A technique of reading aloud with another person to build
fluency and
comprehension. The
readers may take turns, each read the same text
in succession, or read in unison as in
choral
reading.
Phoneme
The smallest unit of sound in speech that combines with others to make a
word. The word bat has three phonemes,
/b/, /a/, and /t/; so does the word through:
/th/, /r/, and /oo/. The ability to notice
phonemes, or phonemic awareness,
is important for success in learning to read and
write.
Phonemic Awareness
The ability to focus on the individual speech sounds in words, to break
the words into their sounds (segmenting),
to play with the sounds, and to blend
them back together again. Paying attention
to individual sounds makes it possible to learn
how letters represent sounds.
Learn more
here.
Phonics
The study and use of letter-sound relationships to help identify written
words.
Phonological Awareness
A more general grasp of the sound system of a language
than phonemic awareness, which is an
important refinement of this ability. The terms
are sometimes used interchangeably, but
phonological awareness refers more to an ability
to notice features of words such as patterns,
syllables, rimes (endings) and
onsets
(initial sounds).
Predicate
The complete predicate is the
verb plus its objects, complements,
and adverbial modifiers that tell what the complete subject does or is.
Example:
The high from my
coffee usually lasts about
an hour.
To find the complete
predicate, determine what the subject (the
high) does. (It) usually lasts
about an hour.
Prefix
A word part, or morpheme, that is affixed to the beginning of a
word to alter its meaning. In transform
and reform, trans- and re-
are prefixes. Children study
prefixes
and suffixes to improve
comprehension.
Present Perfect Tense
The present
perfect is formed like this:
Subject
+
have + past
participle
It's
used when:
-
The time
period has not finished:
I have
seen three
movies this
week.
It's
often used when:
-
Time is not mentioned.
Gerry has
failed his
exam again.
-
The time is recent.
Ikuko has
just arrived in
Victoria.
-
You're using the words "for" or "since".
Greg has
lived here for 20
years.
Greg has
lived here since 1978.
Present Perfect
Continuous Tense
This verb
form is used to tell the about events that
are ongoing from the past into the present.
It is formed in this manner:
Subject +
have/has +
been +
verb +
ing
Due to the
fact that the verb form deals with past
events that continue into the present, the
words "since" and "for" are often used to
tell how long an event has been taking
place.
For example:
-
The girls
have been playing basketball for five
years.
-
I have
been learning English since 2007.
-
Robert
has been taking his medicine every night
this week.
To form a
question, switch the order of the subject
and "have/has." Additional time-related
words are often added to the beginning or
end of the question.
For example:
-
Have the
girls been playing basketball for a long
time?
-
How long
have you been learning English?
-
How often
has Robert been taking his medicine?
Print Awareness
Understanding that print carries meaning and being able to
distinguish print from pictures or other
images. This awareness is necessary in order to
grasp the concepts of print and is an
important early step toward
literacy.
Prior Knowledge
All the
information and experience a reader has in his
or her memory. If readers have no
experience of limited experience with a topic,
comprehension will be limited. Tutors and
mentors have a responsibility to determine what
prior knowledge needs to be activated or
developed for a text to be read and understood.
Source:
United Federation of Teachers Resource Guide (www.uft.org)
Readers’ Theater
A technique of reading aloud a story or script without
staging, props, or costumes. This practice
encourages fluent, expressive reading and deeper
connection with the text.
Recognizing
Story Structure
A comprehension strategy where students learn to
identify the categories of content (setting,
initiating events, internal reactions, goals,
attempts, and outcomes) and how this content is
organized into a plot. Instruction in the
content and organization of stories improves
students’ comprehension and memory of stories.
Recognizing story structure is one of the six strategies that
the National Reading Panel (2003) reports to
have a firm scientific basis for improving text
comprehension.
Rhyme
The repetition of sounds (usually the end sounds) of a word, as in
“The rain in
Spain falls mainly on the plain.” Playing with
rhymes builds phonemic awareness.
Rime
The ending part of a word. In rain and
Spain, the
long a and n sounds form the rime
of ain, while /r/ and /sp/, respectively,
are the onset.
Segmenting
Separating words into their individual sounds. “Say sun.
Now say its sounds: sss, uh, nnn” is a
simple segmenting exercise.
Sight Words (High Frequency Words)
Words that are commonly used in print.
Some of these words are not always spelled or
decoded phonetically, which is the reason
students should learn these words by "sight."
Sounding Out
Reading vowels by pronouncing sounds for their letters in
sequence and then blending the sounds
together. Identifying words in this way is also
called decoding; however, it does not
necessarily indicate an understanding of a
word’s meaning.
Stretching
Elongating a speech sound to make it more obvious.
Structural Analysis
The study of word parts to aid in decoding, building
vocabulary knowledge,
and increasing
comprehension. By becoming familiar with
various prefixes,
suffixes, and
bases,
students extend their ability to identify new
words and to figure out what they mean.
Subject
The subject is the noun phrase in a sentence.
A subject can take the following forms.
noun
Builders are at work.
phrase
The large car stopped outside our house.
gerund
Eating is a pleasure.
infinitive
To read is easier than to write
clause
That he had travelled the world was known by
everyone.
citation
'I love you' is often heard these days.
Source:
Wikipedia
Summarizing
A comprehension strategy where students
determine what is important in what they are
reading by condensing this information and to
putting it into their own words.
Summarizing is one of the six strategies that
the National Reading Panel (2003) reports to
have a firm scientific basis for improving text
comprehension.
Suffix
A word part, or morpheme, that is affixed to the end of a word to
alter its meaning. In transportation and
reflective, -ation and –ive
are suffixes. Studying these words parts
permits accurate decoding and boosts
vocabulary knowledge and
comprehension.
Syllable
A part of a word that is pronounced as a unit. A syllable
always contains a vowel sound (though not
necessarily a vowel; think of the second
syllable of rhythm). Learning to break
words into syllables is important for
structural analysis, which in turn helps
students figure out unfamiliar words.
Synonym
A
word that has the same or nearly the same
meaning as another word. For example,
synonyms for the word boat include ship, vessel,
craft, and yacht.
Tracking
Following each word in a line of type with the eyes.
Some students place their finger below the words
to help with this task.
Verb
Verbs are words that show action. They can
be used to describe actions in the past (ate;
sang), present (fly; play) or future (will surf;
will dance).
Source:
Education Place (www.eduplace.com/tales)
Vocabulary
Knowledge of word meanings, in both spoken and written
language. A large vocabulary makes it
easier to understand what you read, both because
you know the meanings of more of the words and
because the known words provide clues to the
unknown ones.
Vowel
A speech sound made by letting air pass through the
throat and mouth without blocking it, or the
letter representing such a sound. Vowels can
have a short or long sound,
depending on the letters that surround them.
Short vowel:
A vowel sound that isn’t long—for example, a in
cat, e in pet, i in
sit, o in not, and u
in but.
Long vowel:
A vowel that occurs in an accented
syllable and often “says its name”—for example,
the a in relate, the o in no, or
the double e in sleep.
Word Attack
The skill of using a variety of strategies—such as
sounding out, applying
structural
analysis, or using
context clues—to
decode and grasp the meaning of an unfamiliar
word.
Word Family
A group of words that share a rime, or ending. Sun,
bun, and rerun are all in one
family; small, tall, and
waterfall are in another. Working with word
families builds
phonemic awareness.
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